No matterwhere you sit — Madison Avenue or Silicon Valley, or whether you’re responsible for sales and marketing in services or technology, you’ve come to an important realization — email marketing drives revenue.

Your clients and users understand this and you need to figure out how to generate more revenue around email strategy and implementation at your agency or stickiness and lifetime customer value with your software.This multi-part blog series will consider four questions you should be asking when considering building out your own email platform or connecting to an ESP (Email Service Provider). We’ll try to answer these questions both from the creative agency perspective, as well as the technology provider side.

Email Software RFP TemplateChoosing the right email marketing provider might seem like a daunting task for any organization — particularly those with specialized needs.

There are tons of things to consider when looking at a new Email Service Provider such as reliability, deliverability, features, ease-of-use and scalability to mention just a very few. Then you still have to sort through the marketing noise of dozens of ESPs — all of which focus on different aspects.

An RFP can be a great way to eliminate the noise and organize your search into manageable pieces that will ensure you're asking the right questions, comparing apples-to-apples and keeping it all organized to make the best decision possible for your particular needs.

We're biased, of course, about which email marketing platform we prefer. But we've seen a lot of RFPs over the years and we know that not every provider is right for every company's email needs. We have some thoughts about what makes for an effective email marketing RFP.

We've been on the receiving end of a lot of RFPs. Some were well thought out and clear and a few just weren't worth the time to respond. We've taken the best of all of them to create an easy-to-adapt, comprehensive RFP template that you can edit to meet your particular circumstances.

Even if an official RFP process is overkill for your organization, we recommend downloading and filling out the sections as you review various Email Service Providers.

Promote your brand to customers using email marketing campaigns! Consumers are more likely to share a company’s coupons and offers with email than on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, according to a new study.

Google recently began rolling out Gmail Tabs, a new option for inboxes that has the email marketing world standing on a ledge.

Gmail Tabs, which began rolling out in May, are an effort by Google to de-clutter the inbox. Once users switch to the new tabs, Gmail will automatically sort messages into different categories. Users can drag messages into a different tab to direct future messages into that category. The available tabs are: